He can't possibly be as nerdy as us.

It's the way the chipset is designed. It needs the quad channels for performance.

I tried to use 4 sticks of regular RAM in it, and mine wouldn't even boot. 'Wasted' $1800 on DDR4 PC3600 RAM. I ended up using it in another Ryzen system I built as a media PC.

Kinda pissed me off, because as long as I've been working with computers, if the RAM doesn't work in the board, it doesn't fit in the socket. But that RAM did fit, but didn't work.

SRS BZNS! 128G, 32 threads, 16 bays

The Serious Business packs 128GB of DDR4 ECC RAM, 32 CPU threads, and sixteen 3.5" hot-swap bays into a 3u rackmount chassis weighing in at 75 pounds empty. This isn't an exercise in burning money—it's a pretty reasonable design for a small- to mid-size business hosting local infrastructure to service 20 or more (sometimes many more) employees. But it would be a pants-on-head crazy kind of thing to have sitting in your home or apartment.

We jumped off the Intel train for this build, because when you want real horsepower, AMD's Epyc CPUs are a much better buy than Intel's Xeon Silver or Gold. The Epyc 7281 we chose here features 16 cores and 32 threads, with significantly better multi-threaded performance than a Xeon Silver 4114 costing about $100 more. The Xeon Silver is a little faster per-thread than the Epyc, but a whopping 12 extra threads more than makes up the difference for the kinds of workload a server like this is most likely to see—lots of users, and probably lots of VMs, too. (You could shave about $120 off the cost by dropping to an Epyc 7251 with eight cores and 16 threads, but your bang-for-the-buck goes down significantly if you do.)

Our Supermicro rackmount chassis comes with its own 800W redundant power supply; you can plug each module into a separate UPS, which allows you to hot-swap the UPSes when they need battery replacements every few years. What you can't get out of this beast is anything approaching silence. It's fine in a server room, but if you try to share an office with this thing it'll drive you batty—don't say I didn't warn you. (On the plus side, all those redundant fans mean that the monstrous passive heatsink we picked for a cooler is plenty.)

He can't possibly be as nerdy as us.

I think I passed 'nerdy' after my seventh week in SANS training.

Also, I'm heading to Black Hat/DefCon in Las Vegas this coming August.

I can see going to hack cons being a regular thing for me now that I'm working in an offensive security capacity. I wouldn't be surprised if our team goes to any big ones in Toronto. It'd be sick if we all got to head to defcon one year.

Niiiice!

I can never go, now that I have consumed the forbidden weed.

Are you banned right now?

FYI, I always phrase 'offensive security' as active security so it doesn't tweak the risk adverse upper management who get queasy at the thought of their ISO orchestrating denial of service attacks against foreign cybercriminals.

Probably. I got a ticket for possession back in my University days. I have had a pardon since, but I know the US does not acknowledge them.

I've never tried crossing, since the days when you could cross with just a drivers license that they didn't really look at.